What is “good nutrition?” Here today, gone tomorrow studies don’t have the answer. Food marketers claim to have the answer. But we have our own answer.

BY JODI FELTHAM

So, you’ve been thinking about nutrition. But where to start? Just try typing “nutrition” in Google and you’ll find over 270 million sites to search through. Talk about overwhelming.

It seems next to impossible to find some real facts with one study claiming one truth today and then being debunked by another study the following year. Most of us are looking to lose a few pounds as a proactive measure to prevent diet-causing diseases like diabetes and heart attacks.

We aren’t trying to become the next Olympic athlete or trying to get our bodies down to 10 percent body fat. We don’t need fancy menus with caloric breakdowns of each meal. What we need are easy-to-understand and easy-to-follow strategies that will improve our health.

Often, once we get on a nutrition craze, we want a book full of rules that will help us drop 10 to 20 pounds in a month. We try to tackle all our weaknesses at once, give up everything we love, eat everything we hate, and then wonder why we fail or just quit.

We think that if we can muster up enough willpower or discipline, we can persevere through a month-long grueling diet with a loss of 15 pounds as our reward. But, we all know what happens next; Eventually, we fall off the wagon.

We can’t live on a super-strict regime forever. The results are awesome, but temporary. Once we return to our original eating habits, the pounds come back on twice as quickly.

Good nutrition isn’t just some quick fix, it requires a change in lifestyle. But, this change just doesn’t happen over night. It happens by changing one habit at a time.

And, at first, even a small change, like taking a daily multivitamin, is a start in the right direction. By being able to change small habits and succeed, it will give us the strength and courage to dream bigger.

So, start today. What is one small change that you could implement that will bring you closer to your goals? iT!